Will Trump Followers Ever Realize How Insecure and Dangerous Their Idol Is?

   I read many business-oriented email newsletters, including one from Fast Company which had the following attention-grabbing headline this week: “How to spot the warning signs of an insecure leader.”

The subhead went further: “We humans aren’t very good at assessing true leadership qualities and gravitate towards arrogant confidence in those in charge. Unfortunately, that is often a sign of weakness, and the fallout can be tough on teams.”

The article -- click here to read it in full -- was written about business (hence the reference to teams) by a professor of leadership and management at Harvard Business School and a professor of business psychology at Columbia, but it encapsulates the tragedy of the Trump era. It’s bad enough when a business is dragged down by a leader who has deceived both himself and others that he is competent, but it’s tragic when a whole country is victimized by him.

Here are some key excerpts from that article, which will resonate for those of us who recognized Donald Trump as an arrogant, narcissistic incompetent from day one. Try to remember that this was written about business leadership:

We are so seduced by confidence that we habitually end up with overconfident, arrogant leaders.... 

   According to the authors of one study: “Those with limited knowledge…suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach mistaken conclusions and make regrettable errors, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it”... 

    What drives educated, rational people...to select people who seem unaware of their limitations and unjustifiably pleased with themselves, as if being your own greatest fan was indicative of talent or...a useful skill in leading others?….

Imagine you aspire to leadership or power and you have managed to delude yourself into thinking that you are amazing when in fact you lack critical skills. Although this delusion makes you a liability, a risk for others..., it can make you more popular. People will gravitate towards you, thinking your certainty is indicative of skill and talent rather than delusion….

We get distracted by irrelevant information provided in the form of confidence, bravado and aggression, which pertain to style rather than substance. Sadly, we live in a world where style without substance will get you farther than substance without style….

Arrogant leaders are more likely to be insecure than competent. Recent academic research conceptualizes narcissism not as self-love but as self-loathing in disguise. The reason is unsurprising. Arrogance is defined as exaggerating one’s own worth or importance. This takes effort and can be seen as a cover for something that one wishes not to be discovered. It’s a deliberate attempt to compensate for self-perceived deficits or flaws….

Research on narcissism further finds that arrogance and entitlement are often a desperate call for validation and affirmation from others. Bragging about talents that are actually lacking is a strategy for fooling oneself by fooling others and suggests insecurity. This is why narcissists get defensive and aggressive when challenged or belittled. 

This is exactly what Donald Trump’s niece, psychologist Mary Trump, described in her analysis of Trump based on her personal knowledge of his upbringing. The title says it all: Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man. I can picture this book becoming a textbook in future classes about the Trump era.

Regarding those who continue to resonate with Trump’s rhetoric, I can’t urge you enough to read White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, by historian Carol Anderson. While the events of Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 got people talking about “black rage,” she wrote in a Washington Post op-ed that this was instead “white rage at work. With so much attention on the flames, everyone had ignored the kindling.”

The legacy of Donald Trump will be that by emboldening white supremacists with his rhetoric, he lit the kindling, bringing to the surface what had always been there: continued systemic racism.

—————

On a personal note, I want to express my humble appreciation for the support my writing has garnered. Not only have readers donated over $15,000 to my GoFundMe campaign (which you can find at www.FundTalkingTurkey.com), and sent me over $3,000 in checks, they continue to give my broker associates and me their real estate business.  Thank you so much!

 

Fox News, OAN & Newsmax Are ‘Killing People’; Facebook Is Just a Multiplier

 

When President Biden said Facebook was “killing people,” I think we all understood what he meant, though he was forced to elaborate the next day.

My first reaction was that social media like Facebook and Twitter are only multipliers of the disinformation being broadcast by Fox News hosts, One America News (OAN), Newsmax and other right-wing media. They are the ones providing the fake news and disinformation about Covid-19 and the vaccines.

One thing I have observed about my emails from right-wing readers is that they rarely speak for themselves, especially in their social media posts. Rather, they retweet and “like” memes, and repeat what they heard on Fox News, et al. They can’t, it seems, think for themselves, only parrot what others tell them that resonates with their inner and often unspoken beliefs and biases.

One term for this phenomenon is “confirmation bias,” which Wikipedia defines as “the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one's prior beliefs or values.”  I realize that confirmation bias exists on both sides of the political divide. What makes it toxic is when those beliefs or values are rooted in demonstrably untrue facts. As both sides like to say in attacking the other, “You have a right to your own opinions, but not to your own facts.”

In that regard, you might ask why the Washington Post and  mainstream media have sections or segments on fact-checking, but I don’t recall such a segment on Fox News.

The dominant tactic we’re seeing in Republican circles is the use of “wedge issues” to stir the anger and fear in its base.  Think “critical race theory” or “Black Lives Matter” or “radical socialist agenda.”

Let’s look, for example, at critical race theory, a college-level course of study which is not taught in K-12. The allegation that it is taught in K-12 as a way of attacking the dominant caste (as Isabel Wilkerson calls white Americans in her bestseller Caste) is a great way of turning out voters to oust any school board member who would be so audacious as to defend the teaching (or even mention) of racism in our schools.

Wilkerson does a great job in Caste of comparing America’s systemic racism to the caste system of India and the Nazi demonization of non-Aryan races.

One comparison that relates to the debate over critical race theory is how Germany deals with its Nazi past versus how Republicans would like us to deal with our history of slavery, Jim Crow, and systemic racism. In Germany today school children are required to learn about Nazism and how it developed. They are even required to visit a concentration camp. There are monuments that educate about the horrors of the holocaust. Displaying the swastika is illegal. There are no statues of Nazis.

Not so in America. The rebel flag of the Confederacy is a staple of white supremacists, who fight to maintain that legacy. I’m not saying that displaying that flag should be banned legally — that would violate the First Amendment — but I am saying that we should recognize it for what it is, an expression of anti-minority hatred and fear.

The quote that keeps coming to mind is Winston Churchill’s 1948 paraphrasing of George Santayana, “Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.” Germany lives by that lesson, but not us. Not surprisingly, Fox News, for example, totally ignored the centenary of the Tulsa massacre.

The Supreme Court has in the past upheld white supremacy and could do so again. The Dred Scott decision stated that the Bill of Rights didn’t apply to Black people. In 1883 the Court upheld Alabama’s law banning interracial marriage. The Court didn’t reverse that ruling until 1967.

That same year the Supreme Court struck down the 1875 Civil Rights Act. The 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision endorsed the “separate but equal” doctrine, not reversed until the 1954 Brown decision. Today’s conservative majority Court could “Make America Great Again” by upholding those new state laws promoting voter suppression.

 

How Did You Feel When a Friend, Partner, Employer/Employee Lied to You?

  When someone has lied to you, you probably started to question your relationship and whether they are lying to you again, right?

When a spouse cheated on you, were you able to forgive and forget? Or did it cause you to question when he or she was “working late” or going on a business trip without you?

When an employee or employer lied to you, did you “let it slide,” or did you begin to question future communications with him/her?

What’s most surprising about Trump supporters is that they know he is a habitual liar, yet they “let it slide” again and again and fall in line with his next set of lies. Here are some of the lies that surely they know were lies:

>  He said he didn’t have sex with porn star Stormy Daniels, but Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to paying for her silence and went to prison for it.

>  He excused his Access Hollywood  genital grabbing language as “locker room talk,” then claimed it wasn’t his voice.

>  He described the Jan. 6 insurrection as a “love fest.” I think we know better.

>  It rained on his inauguration, but he claimed the sun came out when he spoke. He claimed his inaugural crowd was bigger than Barack Obama’s despite photos proving otherwise.

>  He said that Covid-19 was a Chinese hoax, intended to help the Democrats.

>  He accidentally said that Alabama was at risk from Hurricane Dorian, but because he can’t ever admit he was wrong, he not only lied about it with a Sharpie, but he pressured government agencies to confirm his lie.

>  He said the head of the Boy Scouts called him to say his political speech at the 2017 Jamboree was “the greatest speech ever made to them,” but a Scouts spokesman said no such call had been made — Scouts honor!

A Trumper might still believe one or two of that short list of Trump’s lies, but my own experience as a human being is that it only takes one lie from someone to make me question everything that person says in the future. I suspect that’s true for Trumpers — except when it comes to Donald Trump.

That’s very cult-like. “Cult-45.”

So, how do you explain that behavior by Trump supporters, if not by saying it’s a cult?

I think it’s largely racial. Trump has been successful by playing on voter’s racial fears — fears triggered by the U.S. Census reporting that we’re approaching a time when white Americans will be in the minority. He compounded that by claiming that Mexican immigrants were criminals and rapists, or worse — a claim that no amount of factchecking would fix, since it played to what his base wanted to believe.

In the 2020 election, Trump pleaded with suburban women that they should love him, because Democrats would end single-family zoning, bringing inner city crime to the suburbs. Again, the race card. But suburban women didn’t buy it in enough numbers to carry the day for Trump in 2020.

So now we come to the Big Lie — that the election which Biden won resoundingly was “stolen” through fraud. Again, the truth doesn’t matter to Trump supporters. Lesson number one from Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and other autocrats: repeat a lie often enough and it will be taken as truth.

Trump supporters ultimately should realize they’ve been conned by Trump except for one big thing: he speaks to their fears. They are less wedded to Trump himself than to his philosophy. Tucker Carlson is banking on that.

The one lie which strikes closest to home for me as a journalist, and now a columnist, is that the mainstream media are puppets of the liberal left. I don’t expect any Trumper reading this to be convinced otherwise, and that’s the problem — how to change minds.

The Trump GOP thrives on playing to the fears of its base, but now it’s filling us non-Trumpers with fear that they could succeed, that they could take control of the Congress in 2022 and the White House again in 2024.

 

 

The 2022 Mid-Term Elections Will Test How Gullible & Misinformed We Are

   I’m reminded of the saying attributed (erroneously, it turns out) to Abraham Lincoln that “You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”

Donald Trump and his enablers are working hard to prove that statement wrong — or at least to fool enough voters between now and the 2022 mid-term elections to gain control of the U.S. Congress. And just in case they can’t fool enough voters, they’re also working hard to keep non-Trump voters from the polls.

An actual quote from Abraham Lincoln is quite appropriate in this regard:  “Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether our nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated [to the proposition that all men are created equal] can long endure.”

How much longer can the con we know as the Big Lie build and maintain momentum?

It’s reported that the well-armed and well practiced militias who failed in the January 6 insurrection attempt will take up their arms in August to “reinstate” Donald Trump as president of the United States.  Apparently, they think they could succeed. If those militias do attempt such a coup — for that’s what it would be — and it fails, which it surely will, what effect will that have? Will the Republicans who still consider Trump critical to their own electoral future continue to hold their noses and stand behind him?  Will they, as Republican senatorial candidate J.D. Vance put it so well, “suck it up” and stick with Trump even though they know better?

The fact that so many Americans actually believe the Big Lie (and all the lesser ones) says something very sad, and very disturbing about the United States — namely that roughly 30% of Americans are easily manipulated because they are so gullible and misled.

Surely you have seen the statistics about how uneducated Americans are about basic American facts such as how many branches of government there are. All you need to do is Google the question, “How stupid are Americans,” and you will [not] be surprised how many academic, comedic and journalistic entries you’ll find, such as this June 26, 2020, headline from The Guardian: “Trevor Noah: America ‘dealing with a deadly strain of stupidity’.”

Thom Hartmann’s email newsletter on July 8 reminded us that the term “drinking the Kool-Aid” originated with the Jim Jones religious cult which committed mass suicide on Jones’ order in Guyana back in 1978 by drinking Kool-Aid laced with cyanide.

Hartmann calculates that for every one of the 913 people who committed suicide with Jim Jones, 438 Americans have died because they adopted from Trump a reluctance to take the Covid-19 vaccine. However, unlike Jones, who killed himself along with his followers, Donald Trump had himself and his family secretly vaccinated in the White House. This shouldn’t surprise us, but it also probably wouldn’t faze his followers, who have been nicknamed Cult-45.

There are two ironies that are apparent to me. The first one is that the craziness coming from the Republicans, QAnon, Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump himself is as motivating for those of us who recognize the con as it is for Trump’s base.

The second irony is that Covid is surging only in the states with low vaccination rates, and virtually all Covid deaths are people who declined to be vaccinated. In other words the virus is probably killing off Trumpers in numbers that may well match or exceed the number of non-Trump voters the same states are seeking to suppress.

The coming months will get more and more interesting. The Trump organization and possibly Trump himself may go on trial. There may be that promised insurrection in August. There will be more books published about Trump and his actions as president and before he became president. Worst of all, however, there will be more hysteria manufactured about wedge issues such as critical race theory. Buckle up!

Trumpers’ Hatred of ‘Democratic Socialism’ Only Betrays Their Ignorance

   

    Many Americans, it seems, are so easily manipulated emotionally and politically, that it frightens the rest of us — and people in other countries — who know better.

Americans are also largely untraveled. If I recall correctly, Pres. George W. Bush had never been to Europe before he was elected president. Even today, only a third of Americans have a valid passport and only 38% have ever had a passport, even though a passport is now required to visit Canada and Mexico.

My family is quite the opposite. My sister Janet married a Swede whom she met in Turkey on vacation from her job chartering boats in Greece. This December she will celebrate her 50th wedding anniversary in Sweden where she and Staffan have retired. I attended their wedding in Stockholm’s “old city” in 1971 and have visited them twice since. I have also visited the other Scandinavian countries except for Norway, all of which happily thrive under “democratic socialism.” 

A few months back, I described how Janet’s husband Staffan had a major surgery which involved a lengthy hospital stay and the flying in from Atlanta of a famous heart surgeon. The cost of that operation and hospital stay was under $100, thanks to Sweden’s socialized medicine.

I was reminded of that story on Monday, when “The Hartmann Report” consisted of a lengthy description of democratic socialism in the Scandinavian countries and increasingly in the rest of Europe. (I recommend Thom Hartmann’s “daily rant” on Substack.com.) The headline was “Why America Can’t Have ‘Nice Things’,” and the subhead was “So, if the majority of Americans want Scandinavian/European healthcare, schools, unions, wages and taxes-on-the-rich, why don’t we have these things?”

It goes back to how easily Americans are manipulated by those (primarily the wealthy) who don’t want us to have what Swedes and other Scandinavians have because it will mean they will pay substantially higher income taxes.

Income taxes are far more progressive in those countries than they are here, but the result is a universally higher standard of living — and zero bankruptcies due to medical debt, which is experienced by over a million American families every year. The result is also zero stress about being “one paycheck away from homelessness,” which describes the situation for far too many Americans.

I’ve posted Hartmann’s Monday “rant” about Sweden (which contains many links to supporting information) below in this blog. It’s a real wake-up call which you’ll want to share with others. We don’t need to have so much inequity and suffering in America.

It is truly disheartening that so many Americans have succumbed to disinformation by Donald Trump and his enablers that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have a “radical socialist agenda.” Come on, America, wake up! You are being duped by interests who don’t want you to enjoy “the good life,” because it will cost them money.

   NOTE: This column is costing me over $900 per week to publish in the Denver Post. Please consider donating to my GoFundMe campaign. Find it at FundTalkingTurkey.com.

 Here's further support provided by a reader:

 2021 Happiness Index  (Scandinavian countries always rank in and around the top 5)

 https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/happiest-countries-in-the-world

 2021 Economic Freedom Index 

 https://www.heritage.org/index/ranking